Traditionalists and nostalgia.

zsas · Apr 22, 2012

Correlation does not mean causality. Just because your Delta 100 v Canon D proved your point does it really mean anything? What one prefers to photograph, paint, the type of music to listen to/perform, and other artistic expressions/pursuits; does not give you a platform to judge upon. Your armchair psychoanalysis of your brethren's interests (ie traditional photography) is frankly rude. Personally I photograph everything (my kids at the park or a beautiful landscape) and your judgement doesn't bother my interest, what bothers me, is that if I was a landscaper only, and every year I made a trek to my favorite national park to photograph serenity; who are you to judge that I am not in the present? Art, nature, humanity; are all intertwined, if one leans one way (ie more nature than say urban); why on earth do you think that would be a problem?

batwister · Apr 22, 2012

alapin said:
We don't know when the Delta 100 photos were taken as compare to those with canon 60d. You must remember that digital cameras have only been around as little as 14 years.

Delta has only been around since 1992. My point was that I believe many people, particularly younger photographers moving from digital, start shooting film with a certain traditional aesthetic in mind. This seems to lead to them seeking out 'the land time forgot' in many, many cases. I've spent a great deal of time searching flickr as of late for developer and film combinations and I'm contantly surprised by the apparent aversion to modern life these photographers have. This led to me thinking about how that has a bearing on the way people think about film. The argument many of us will make when put on the spot by skeptics is how emulsion is the superior technology, that it isn't old hat. We understand that people have certain prejudices against 'old' things and we try to convince them otherwise. My argument would be that these people have no concept of which is the better technology, only the types of images they see (subject matter and treatment) and the connotations these images have. What rubs people the wrong way about film is the type of image they associate with it, in the same way we might feel about digital after seeing heavily saturated HDR images. It's a massive turn off.

alapin said:
The canon 60d was not released until the last part of 2010. So any photos taken by it would more likely be something we would recognize as the 21st century.

And a truck load of Delta 100 left the factory today.

batwister · Apr 22, 2012

zsas said:
Correlation does not mean causality. Just because your Delta 100 v Canon D proved your point does it really mean anything? What one prefers to photograph, paint, the type of music to listen to/perform, and other artistic expressions/pursuits; does not give you a platform to judge upon. Your armchair psychoanalysis of your brethren's interests (ie traditional photography) is frankly rude. Personally I photograph everything (my kids at the park or a beautiful landscape) and your judgement doesn't bother my interest, what bothers me, is that if I was a landscaper only, and every year I made a trek to my favorite national park to photograph serenity; who are you to judge that I am not in the present? Art, nature, humanity; are all intertwined, if one leans one way (ie more nature than say urban); why on earth do you think that would be a problem?

I'm not sure I'm being rude, as traditional photography is very much my interest and my sole means of making images. I'm passionate about it, which is why I started this thread. My intention was to share my observation about what I believe turns average Joe off film, which surely has an affect on its availablity.

FYI, I only make photographs in the landscape and have a deep connection with the outdoors.

zsas · Apr 22, 2012

batwister said:
My intention was to share my observation about what I believe turns average Joe off film, which surely has an affect on its availablity.

If Joe doesn't want to photograph using film, so be it, I do don't wear the weight of world on my back because I know someone will be there to continue making film. I therefore don't think we as a community need to change artistic focus to save the medium. What we need is all our collective analog'rs to continue to do what makes us happy and the rest will follow. If you disagree, fine, we all see things in our unique ways and what makes us different is what unites us as analog photographers. If you feel so inclined to change your artistic focus (say landscape to street) we would all pat you on the back; if you stay the same, we would pat you on the back the same too. I think the thread that binds us is so thin yet strong; in that what analog'rs care more about is that we are out photographing and sharing than keeping score who is doing it ABC way vs XYZ way. There is a lot of truth in Rick's reply...

batwister · Apr 22, 2012

Thanks Andy, I respect your position.

If this was a call for a change in artistic direction, it would be for variety and the doing away with perceived norms in representation. Please don't take offence, but I don't see much variety in the output of traditional images on Flickr, certain fine art magazines or indeed here. Mainly a holding on tight to traditions of representation, of years and movements gone by - namely, pictorialism. Maybe collectivism is more important when the ship is going down, but of course, detrimental to any individual concerns.

Brian C. Miller · Apr 22, 2012

batwister said:
If we're trying to keep film alive, why do we continue to pile on the dust? ... It's simply anorakia to them ....

In essence, film isn't the problem, it's the unattractive curiosities of the people who shoot it.

Uh, "anorakia" isn't a word I've seen before. Could you please define it for me?

Anyways, photography is one of those things that, at its very essence, requires something in front of the lens. You want to see the 1950s today? Not with a camera you won't. With a pencil or a paint brush, sure. But not with a camera. Walk out the door and click the shutter. What do you get? 2012. No matter what process you use, you get 2012. Maybe 2012 can be dressed up to look like 1950 or 1873, but all you'll really get is 2012.

I've met quite a few people who have recently picked up film cameras. For a hobby, digital just wasn't doing it for them. They wanted something different.

Film isn't going to see a brilliant resurgence, and it isn't due to where people point or don't point the lens. It's due to the fact that an easier, more convenient method of making images has taken hold. Note, that doesn't mean higher quality. Just easier and more convenient.

Now, then: "unattractive curiosities?" What's in front of the lens is what's in front of the lens! From what I've seen, the things that have been photographed in yesteryear with film are being photographed today. What I think that you're trying to get at is this:

"Ralph Steiner, the late, great photographer, would occasionally write me a funny, provocative letter after he had read one of my published articles. He would end with the words: 'But you still have not told me in which direction to point the camera -- and this is what matters.' And he is right."
-- Bill Jay, On Being a Photographer, p. 31, "Selecting a Subject"

This will always be true for photography. We can't photogaph what we imagine. We can photograph what we can get and then create something in the enlarger, but really, the medium has severe limitations.

I'm guessing that what you want to see is a huge shift in where to point the lens. Honestly, right off hand I can't think of a totally unique direction to point a camera. Everything's been done, so that sort of comes down to the proposition of how to basically use a camera. The few really unique things that can be done with film are things like the strip (slit) camera.

Other than that, go for 8x10 and above and wow them with a jillion tons of glorious detail with gargantuan prints.

MattKing · Apr 23, 2012

I think that if you use something like flickr as your database then the results are going to be skewed by the fact that the requirement that the images be posted on the internet is going to make the sample problematic.

So much of the transition to digital photography has been about issues of presenting the photographic image, rather than issues about photographic preferences.

I see a much lower percentage of digital images with a portrait orientation than when slides and prints were the presentation option. I am sure that is in part because the display options (other than prints) for digital images favours the landscape orientation. Does this mean that those who shoot and display photographs with a portrait orientation are more nostalgic than others?

I think that it is true that those who have a tradition with film are more likely to enjoy and continue to explore that tradition, but that has little to do with the medium. It just means that people like to do things that they already know they like.

Steve Smith · Apr 23, 2012

Brian C. Miller said:
Uh, "anorakia" isn't a word I've seen before. Could you please define it for me?

Try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorak_(slang)

On a radio programme about the Titanic last week, one of the experts was referred to as a Titanorak!

Steve.

batwister · Apr 23, 2012

MattKing said:
I see a much lower percentage of digital images with a portrait orientation than when slides and prints were the presentation option. I am sure that is in part because the display options (other than prints) for digital images favours the landscape orientation.

This is interesting to me. The fact that most digital images never leave the screen inevitably has an impact on desired presentation and orientation preference (not in that way ). Since I've had my Dell monitor, having the option to flip the screen has been beneficial in this regard. Having been influenced by a certain British landscape photographer (who composes portrait predominantly) I find myself framing my digital images this way, 90% of the time. This has more to do with awkward proportions for me, being used to square format. Many have spoke about how the 3:2 format is just a little too wide and feels difficult in landscape orientation and I would agree. Having said that, I think it's true that many digitalists prefer landscape (orientation). I believe this has as much to do with the screen their images never leave as it does cinema's impact on photography and the 'film still' aesthetic - usually wide angle, staged scenes, always landscape orientation. Usually self portraits, this has always been something of an influential fad on Flickr and the landscape orientation is vital for the filmic effect they depend on. But this is something you see an equal amount of with film photographers. Think Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson, Alex Prager, Stan Douglas and so on for this aesthetic.

MattKing said:
Does this mean that those who shoot and display photographs with a portrait orientation are more nostalgic than others?

If we're talking about nostalgia in the sense of classic pictorialism, then no, I believe these photographers usually favour landscape orientation - which is deemed more painterly.

On the whole though, orientation doesn't seem to have any correlation with the nostalgia I talk about, which is concerned with representation, less presentation.

blansky · Apr 23, 2012

Portrait orientation for portraits can sometimes have a "headshot" sort of connotation where if a person was to shoot portraits in a landscape mode it can take a mundane shot and sometimes turn it more of a "man in his environment" sensibility.

Personally I don't correlate portrait or landscape with nostalgia at all.

Both are just different ways to tell a story.

John Austin · Apr 23, 2012

The more the merrier,

While I will not cease smashing current attempts at C19 imagery on the stony ramparts of my aesthetic, I do accept that all those using rabid rectlinears and making sickly yellow prints are performing a great service of keeping silver jelly manufacturers in operation, in turn keeping my business viable

To you I give my thanks

However, to play with old media and old image forms is downright lazy, my Southern Ocean landscape work included here - As I typed above, I hold it is crucial for the continued survival of the medium, in any visual sense, for us to continue exploring its visual potential - I acknowledge this exploration is made difficult by the narrow confines of silver jelly medium itself, but this narrowness can be used to focus our work - This exploration will be hampered if we turn to C19 means in this exploration, it will take us backwards

John

removed-user-1 · Apr 25, 2012

Film gives me creative control, regardless of my subject matter. The only part of my process that's not in my direct control is the manufacture of the film itself (and I'm thinking about how to change that). It's not about nostalgia; when I make a negative or print, I'm creating a physical object that interacted with the actual light from the scene I photographed.

TheFlyingCamera · Apr 25, 2012

Grumpy Old Man said:
In these enlightened days of post-modernism, which I never really grasped, photography, initially the archetypal modernist medium (Rodschenko, Molohy-Nage, Strand and some WC Americans), seems to have fallen into a neo-romantic cess pit, with some workers going out of their way to find ancient Petzval lenses, use wet-plates and make bromoil prints, a print form the pre-WWII London Salon was guilty of regularly exhibiting - There is a current thread on loving paper negs - Grow up!

I would venture to argue that the vast majority of people choosing to use those vintage processes and tools today would A: take extreme umbrage at your chastisement to 'grow up' with regard to their interest in antique processes, and B: rebut your comment by stating that their interest in bromoil, pictorialism, petzval lenses and/or paper negatives stems not from some twisted sense of a Freudian Oedipus nostalgia complex but rather from an actual appreciation for the positive aesthetic qualities those tools posess. I print in platinum because I like the tones, textures and controls I get when using a hand-coated process.

And you're just as guilty of that nostalgia kink as those you try to asperse - Photography is not bracket-ended by high Modernism, silver-gelatin prints and enlargements. There was a vast continuity before and after the period of 1920-1960. Just because pictorialism doesn't fit your personal aesthetic, or post-modernist work like Diane Arbus or Cindy Sherman or the Bechers, does not invalidate or reduce their importance.

Brian C. Miller · Apr 25, 2012

Grumpy Old Man said:
I don't see a path out of the way still images are perceived ...

Bingo! We live in an interactive, 3D-ish world, and perceive things based on our individual dementia. The medium has limits! Want to see a different photography? It's called a lenticular lens array, and provides a 3D effect, and maybe even a little movement. But it's still a static image. There's a utility that makes little movie loops for you, ala Harry Potter magic newspaper images. But that only exists on a computer screen. For film, you'd have to set up a little projector, which was done for an art installation. And it's nearly a static image.

But none of that gives you the attention-getting rush of seeing an airplane smashing into a building, a dirigible on fire, a president being shot, etc., etc. A picture of ______ is still a picture of ______. (Insert whatever banality you like. Flower, mountain, naked people, abstract whatever, yadda yadda yadda yadda.) No adrenaline rush, no engagement of the fight-or-flight reflex, nothing.

It's a picture, and it's always going to be a picture. The world is chock full of people producing art. "Professionals" have always complained about this "problem" since dry plates, and especially since Mr. Eastman introduced the Kodak camera. Yes, anybody can click that shutter! And now of course cameras are on every cell phone. If you want to see the world differently, if you want others to share that vision, then you have to imagine that vision, and bring that vision into a physical dimension. Once it is in a physical dimension, then you must propagate it.

You want your photograph to stand out in a sea of pictures?
Here it is:
Big!
Bright!
Bold!

If you don't want your image to stand out, do something that the herd isn't doing, or just ignore all of that and fit right in with everybody else.

batwister · Apr 25, 2012

TheFlyingCamera said:
Just because pictorialism doesn't fit your personal aesthetic, or post-modernist work like Diane Arbus or Cindy Sherman or the Bechers, does not invalidate or reduce their importance.

Pictorialism is/was great, but it's important to see past the process and aesthetic perhaps? The 'post-modernist' photographers you mention have produced images we remember - process became transparent. The hostility some craft oriented photographers show towards post-modernists might have to do with there being no apparent technique they can emulate, only strong images, which makes them confront their photographic abilities... or lack thereof. Indulging in these techniques seems to be a rekindling of the awe that is simply witnessing an image form on exotic materials and more often than not is a bypassing of any deeper connection they might experience with content. Curiosity over inspiration. This is when nostalgia becomes a brick wall and a creative cop out.

I'm not referring to hobbyists so much, but people who use these techniques as gimmicky artistic statements - and get published doing it. This influences others who might take up the medium, in the same way a punk band becoming famous might - "if he can do it, I can." This kind of visceral becomes uninspired very quickly. This is an insult to all those great photographers devoting their lives to the exploration of seeing - these are the people producing images we will remember and cherish. We can't cherish stained materials and optical characteristics, they don't stick in the mind somehow.

TheFlyingCamera · Apr 25, 2012

I don't know that you need to "see past" the aesthetic. It is its own justification, and it is certainly emblematic of its time period. When you see certain kinds of Pictorialist images, you think "oh, Art Nouveau", and when you see others, "oh.... that crap". But period-original Pictorialism, just like period-original Modernism or post-Modernism, stands by itself as an artifact of its time. Someone doing Pictorialist images today, however, needs to have an artistic justification for doing it, because it IS no longer current. Not saying you can't have a creative justification for using it, but you have to have a clear, articulate reason. Otherwise you are a dilettante hobbyist just aping a dead style because you can't think creatively on your own.

batwister · Apr 25, 2012

TheFlyingCamera said:
Someone doing Pictorialist images today, however, needs to have an artistic justification for doing it, because it IS no longer current.

Exactly. If someone entered the room speaking in a 16th century dialect, you'd want a good explanation, and I don't see why it should be any different with out of date visual languages.

zsas · Apr 25, 2012

^ Your analogy although well thought out, is flawed because art does not ascribe to the same rules. If I wanted to bark like a dog to talk, I could lose my job, wife, etc., If I wanted to do that for art, well that might be called performance art and could make me the most successful performance artist to walk the earth....

If one likes Ansel, so be it, like Gursky, so be it....if one emulates their work in their own work, so be it...art has always been like that (analog aside)...

CGW · Apr 25, 2012

OK, what about the work here?

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/an-amateur-snapshot-of-kodaks-early-days/

batwister · Apr 25, 2012

zsas said:
If I wanted to bark like a dog to talk, I could lose my job, wife, etc., If I wanted to do that for art, well that might be called performance art and could make me the most successful performance artist to walk the earth....

Not without context and not without being relevant to modern means of interpretation. For instance, what type of dog? Would you be down on all fours? Would you be in a suit or furry costume with ears? Would you be in a glass box, on a skateboard, hanging from wires? Different performance schools might teach different ways of mimicking dog behavior and different ways of responding to space in order to provoke different reactions. One interpretation might strike a chord with audiences universally, another might be mocked, one might cause public outrage and lead to you being institutionalised! As wacky as contemporary performance art is, it has aesthetic codes, styles and approaches and they won't all be universally accepted as genius. I've seen some things in constructed spaces that just wouldn't work on a street corner and certainly not on stage.

All art has its rightful places and means of communicating and some just won't fit with the zeitgeist. That work is better left on your own wall. It's about tapping into the spirit of the times or simply not getting it, which is when most artists will fail to find an audience. There are rarely ideas as brilliant as the barking dog which will challenge what is culturally accepted. If a pictorialist photographer is capable of doing that, then nostalgic photography might have something timely and worthwhile to say. Most of the time it only seems to appeal, quite incestuously, to other photographers.

batwister · Apr 25, 2012

CGW said:
OK, what about the work here?

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/an-amateur-snapshot-of-kodaks-early-days/

Some of these are really good actually, but better without reference to the camera perhaps?

CGW · Apr 25, 2012

batwister said:
Some of these are really good actually, but better without reference to the camera perhaps?

Could give a toss about the camera/film used. My point is that they're just as good/bad/cliche-ridden/trite as today's. What's interesting is decoding them as artifacts relative to a milieu. What do the say about the world that made them? Just more gas on the fire?

batwister · Apr 25, 2012

CGW said:
My point is that they're just as good/bad/cliche-ridden/trite as today's. What's interesting is decoding them as artifacts relative to a milieu.

That's fine, but does that social and historical context depend on the type of camera used or is that only of interest to nostalgia concerned photographers, who may want to emulate the results? Why else is the camera name important? Are they less interesting with simply a date attached or even without as plain old images depicting human experience?

For me, working out the time frame is more interesting than it being stated. Then I can actually look at the image.

EDIT: With all of these salutes to Kodak, I do wonder why contemporary work is never used in the articles. This is more evidence of the problem really. Do images from the 1930s say "Kodak" more than modern work? Imagine what a 'Kodak Masters' award for notable contemporary work would do to draw in the kids.

pbromaghin · Apr 25, 2012

CGW said:
Could give a toss about the camera/film used. My point is that they're just as good/bad/cliche-ridden/trite as today's. What's interesting is decoding them as artifacts relative to a milieu. What do the say about the world that made them? Just more gas on the fire?

Good point. They are all very well executed, even the corny ones. And yes, they are just as good or bad as today, but how many of them would have been cliched 80 years ago? I remember somebody complaining that Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" was hackneyed. It was pointed out to him (none too gently) that he had finally gotten to the original master after reading 40 years of imitators.

Alan Klein · Apr 25, 2012

I could see why those photos won awards back then. They are just as good today.

Traditionalists and nostalgia.

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